


Carry Me (somewhere beyond myself)

by dunedinparsley



Series: End of Year Cleaning (2019) [1]
Category: The Song of the Lioness - Tamora Pierce, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Drug Addiction, Eating Disorders, Gen, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Modern AU, Optimistic Ending, Recovery, Speech Disorders, Unhealthy Relationships, but I hope you like it!, this is uhhh the angstiest thing I've ever written and I'm not entirely sure where it came from
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-11
Updated: 2019-12-11
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:48:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21744781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dunedinparsley/pseuds/dunedinparsley
Summary: Thom Trebond met Roger when he was ten. Somehow, that seemed like the most important thing, between his birth and his twenty-third birthday.AKA Thom has a very difficult time getting through to adulthood in many ways, and it is Roger who seems to be beside him through it all, until he's not.The title is a lyric from Emmet Michael's 'Snow' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXB3bmpfAZI).
Relationships: Roger of Conté/Thom of Trebond, implied relationship: Numair/Thom
Series: End of Year Cleaning (2019) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1567225
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	Carry Me (somewhere beyond myself)

**Author's Note:**

> 'End of Year Cleaning' is a series of WIPs which I have started in the past years which I aim to pull out of the metaphorical cupboard, dust off, finish as best and as promptly as I can before the year is over, without fussing about editing or making things as good as I want them to be, because that's never going to happen. They may be slightly messy but at least they're here! I started this fic three or four years ago, the draft being 1500 words long, and wrote the rest as it is now in the last eighteen hours.
> 
> Major warnings: generally very unhealthy and manipulative relationship which begins when one party is sixteen and the other an adult, abusive on the grounds of power imbalance; heroin use, addiction, withdrawal and accidental fatal overdose; marijuana use and marijuana-triggered paranoia.
> 
> Minor warnings (non-explicit, not dwelled upon): underage drinking; child neglect; death of a parent; brief instance of violent parental child abuse; abnormal and unhealthy violence perpetrated by a sibling; eating disorders; high school bullying; suicidal ideation; sex; domestic violence.

Thom Trebond met Roger when he was ten. Roger was sixteen, and entirely too polite and charming to be a normal person. Their meeting was at a dinner party that Thom did not want to be at, if for no other reason, but because Alanna was not there. His twin sister, his other half in mischief, if nothing else, was not there, and that was most certainly a problem. She was in the hospital with a broken collarbone, and their father didn’t care – he didn’t visit her. Or perhaps just put all of the care he had into dressing Thom in a little semi-formal suit that made his skin itch and smacked him across the face until he was dizzy enough to be dragged into the car and to the Conte household.

Thom was swept up by an elderly woman who cooed over him and introduced him to all of the other party-goers. Thom thought of Alanna, and how horrible she must feel left all alone in the hospital.

The only conversation that had any of his attention was one with Roger. Roger was one of four young people there – Roger’s cousin, Jon, who at twelve years old looked like a king holding court, Thom himself, and a wailing two year old. Lil was positive that Roger and Thom would be 'like two peas in a pod'.  
  
They weren't. Thom didn't _understand_ Roger. He didn't like Roger, either. Roger was well composed, like he was. He was clever, far cleverer than Thom, which obviously made him very annoying. Still, they discussed 'The Lord of the Rings', and Thom was sufficiently entranced by the subject matter that Roger's extreme levels of annoying could be ignored.  
  
Soon enough Thom had forgotten that Roger was real, not just a beautiful quiet corner of his imagination, and life went on. Every morning Thom would practise piano, and Alanna would lift weights which sometimes seemed bigger than she was. They would go to school, then come home and study, then Thom would play piano as Alanna trained again. She said the music helped her know what she was working for. They would pull pranks on their babysitters and have wrestling matches which Alanna would always win.  
  
Things got harder when they started high school. Alanna cut her hair and started wearing looser clothing to hide her breasts. She stopped talking, but for with Thom. She asked, in the dead of night when no-one but Thom could hear her, if he would please call his sibling 'Alan'. Thom didn't question it. He didn't understand, but he began to – he researched the issues of gender as his brother tried his best to hide how much he was hurting because of the world around him. Thom did his best to help Alan, tried his best to make things better, but his own troubles came from his voice. He did not speak when he started high school, unless asked a question in class. Apparently it was a toxic mix. His silence 'meant something' to the older students, and that 'something' was rudeness, and disrespect for his 'superiors'. His eloquent answers in classes were treated as 'showing off' and being 'an attention seeker'.

It started with insults. Just quiet ones, subtle ones. Whispered in the hallways between classes, or thrown at the back of his head on a rolled up piece of paper. Then came the shoving. He was shoved against lockers, walls, and doors. He would try to shove back, but no, he was neither strong or large, and his protests against the abuse did nothing.  
  
He told Alan, who threatened to beat up the next person who touched his brother. Thom hushed Alan and punched his shoulder with a quiet mutter of 'don't you dare'. For the first time in days, they smiled at each other, and for a moment the world was okay. Thom told the principal about the harassment. His complaint was ignored, and the harassment only continued – insults and slurs were thrown at him as his body was thrown against walls. He could no longer eat without pain that made him throw up, no longer breathe without the bruises on his ribs burning. He found out that he was a faggot less as a realisation on its own as a quiet dusk, its dark, heavy warmth settling into him in a way others could see and he only felt.

He stopped talking entirely after six months. He started going to self defence classes. He trained as hard as he could, with a mentor he was sure he had met before. He realised, three classes in, that his mentor, Roger, was in fact the Roger who had discussed Dwarfish politics with him when he was ten, Roger who was meant to be a figment of his imagination. He stumbled as he realised that, and tripped, only to have Roger prop him up with a wink and a smile. His returned smile was shaky, but there.

A little after his fourteenth birthday Thom started to train physically as often as his brother. He would wake from restless sleep at four in the morning and practice piano until Alan awoke, and then they would train until they were more muscle and sweat than they were skin. They would fight together and study together. They sat together in all their shared classes, trying to defend each other from the world around them. Thom stopped going to piano lessons. His hands couldn’t be trained to punch so hard and play so gently at the same time.

Alan liked being fit, being thin, being able to fight as well as any other boy. Thom liked the look of his wrists and thighs being tiny.

Thom and Alan developed eating disorders together. Thom worse than Alan. He fell gracelessly and easily to eighty-four pounds. Alan, in the midst of his eating disorder, stopped binding down his breasts, and began to talk once more. Alan retook the name Alanna, and went back up to one hundred pounds. Thom remained eighty-five for a month, then dropped another two. That's when he was hospitalised.  
  
He collapsed in the middle of the hallway, and couldn't wake up. His body had started to shut down, close in on itself. He was in hospital for a week. His father came to see him on the second day of his week only on the order of a Child Protection advocate and saw two children he may as well have never met. He had not known of 'Alan', and he had not known of the twins' eating disorders. When he saw his son, lying frail in a hospital bed, too tired to even scowl he began to cry, more a child than his own had ever had the chance to be.  
  
Alanna slapped him as hard as she could. He bore his bruise with stubborn shame.  
  
Their father pulled Thom out of his self defence classes and began to cook for his children, although he was horrible at it. Thom had been cooking for Alanna, and sometimes himself, before then. He taught his father how to cook, and slowly started to eat a little as his therapy began and promptly ended. He wasn’t allowed to go back to training his strength. He sat at his piano and couldn’t play it, could barely bring himself to touch it. He felt like he would contaminate it.

He was out of school for three months. He became soft in some ways and hard in others, felt his body as lukewarm running water and his emotions shrivelling as flowers under frost. He grew apart, just a little, from his sister. She made friends and found herself in more extra curricular activities, while he stayed at home reading, studying, almost half-dead. He didn’t have a conception of ‘suicide’, but he felt it in his body like it was a part of his soul.  
  
When he went back to school it was to find Roger as an assistant teacher, as beautiful and strange as ever, and Alanna with a group of friends who adored her, whom she adored. There was Jonathan, the mayor's son and a pretty boy with a saviour complex – they had known him as children, in the vague way children do, and had forgotten what it was to be in the presence of a small deity. Then there were Raoul and Gary, who seemed to be well enough, although overly enthusiastic, and Gary overworked and hence overtired. Sacherell, Frances, and Douglas were the three in their year, and were all far too talkative for his liking. Still, he would sit beside Alanna at lunch at put up with their chattering. His weight gradually stabilised, and he was left alone by the other students. His grades were perfect, although he never spoke. His piano began to accumulate dust.

He had never been a hugely emotional child. He hadn't cried but for from _physical_ pain. He hadn't sought out other people's company, and didn’t know loneliness but for that of being apart from his sister. He became apart from his sister. He could almost _see_ the space between them growing as she became someone who wanted to change society from inside it, save it and protect it as best she could, and he became someone who wanted to live outside of it.

He didn't like _feeling,_ he decided. It ruled he and what his body did. He absolutely _hated_ crying. It was disgusting. The sensation of hot little beads running down his cheeks was not acceptable and he wouldn't let it continue.

He threw himself into his studies. He studied everything, mastered everything a sixteen year old could in isolation and silence. And he began to choose his classes based on whether Roger would be assisting in teaching them. History, law, sociology, politics, Roger took the humanities not as a lover of the way humans worked or the way the world was built, but as someone who didn’t quite know what it meant to be a human was and wanted to learn and to be _better_ at it than anyone else. Thom didn’t want to be human. He wanted to know everything that Roger knew and more – and he came so close so often that it seemed to scare the other man, brilliant as he was. They were fighting each other in pages of books and mountains of knowledge, silently and relishing in the passion of competition with something close to an equal. They were both smarter than any other teacher or student in the school, and they both knew it.

He was told he needed to figure out what he wanted to do as a career. He couldn’t just memorise and know all the facts in the world and understand how they came to be. What he wanted was to be a god, in perfect control and knowledge, able not just to create but to modify, to allow for more creation from his subjects, but never letting them surpass him. He wanted to watch from the heavens. Roger wanted to be an old god, walking amongst his disciples and changing the world beneath his feet as he moved. The careers councillor recommended that Thom become a lawyer, with a mind like his. He asked quietly without thinking if perhaps he could become a pianist. He sat down to audition to enter the school music program and froze in terror. The careers councillor said a politician, or perhaps a historian if he didn’t want to live too immediately in the present, might be more suitable.

He followed Roger home one day, walking in silence at his side. Roger smiled magnanimously and made him a cup of coffee, and asked what he would do if he took over the world. Roger’s friends, all adults, though younger than Roger, all beautiful and vibrant and bitter, arrived. Thom hated people who didn’t know things, and most of them were as vapid as Roger was brilliant. They looked down at _him_ as if he was stupid, a little child, and looked up at Roger as if he was already the deity he wished he was. They didn’t see what Thom saw, that Roger wasn’t the only one in the world with a mind on fire. He thought that one day he would ask Roger why he surrounded himself with people so much _stupider_ than him, but instead he was just proud that Roger chose him and pulled him close to sit beside him and throw an arm around. Thom discovered that he hated the taste of wine, but he kept drinking anyway. He was sure he learned more about what it meant to be a real person in that one night in Roger’s living room than his entire time at school. He learned about philosophy half-drunk and flushed with anxiety and thrills, and it seemed so much more real than anything else they could talk about, seemed so much more real than becoming a lawyer or a politician or any other leech of meaning.

He learned more about sex in the tipsy crowd exchanging long, slow and indiscriminate kisses as if trading wine between their tongues, than he had ever understood. Roger whispered against his ear when the music was too loud or the topic too important to be heard, and his breath was hot and sweet and his hand strong on Thom’s thigh. It went unspoken that Thom was not to tell anyone as Roger bid him goodnight at two in the morning.

His father had waited up for him to return home and failed to either shout or cry, simply pointed upstairs to his bedroom. Alanna was so angry that she hadn’t waited at all. He refused to tell her where he’d been. She said she didn’t care. He didn’t know if it was revenge for that first time alone, but he was sure she didn’t tell him anything important, anything about her life or her self, for years.

Thom didn’t sleep until dawn and when he woke he was stained with semen from dreams he couldn’t remember but for the same heat as that of Roger’s breath on his ear.

Thom became a recalcitrant teen, living more for Roger than anyone else. He thought they were going to drive each other mad and that they both looked forward to it. He began to speak again, loud and defiant and passionate, only as ready to fight as he was to _learn,_ to drink in everything about the world he could and make himself invulnerable to it.

Roger was orphaned, too. Thom didn't know what he thought of that.

Alanna was popular, in the unspoken respect of people who were simply good, simply brave, simply intelligent, simply strong. Jonathan graduated two years ahead of them and joined the police the day he graduated; she said she would be following him as soon as she could. She held Jonathan’s fort within the school, within the community, a _de facto_ leader of the righteous and the proper. She loved Thom and her father only in the way that families can love one another when they have no understanding of each other. Thom loved her in everything she was and everything she was becoming, and somehow found he didn’t care if she felt the same. They were no longer twins through the way they lived. Where Alanna was strong, small and compact in her muscle and stature, so steady in the core of herself that the whips of her anger, her righteousness, couldn’t shake how strong she held herself.

She wasn’t a woman, she did whisper to him one day when he found her half-naked and in tears on her bedroom floor, Jonathan’s jacket and a discarded condom on the floor, but she wasn’t a man, either. He asked if her heart was broken, and she said that it would never break for Jonathan, because her heart had so much more to it than him. Thom kissed her on the forehead and told her that Jonathan was a prick and that she should probably get tested for any STIs. She smacked him and they tussled like children again, anger and laughter and tears all at once. They straightened themselves up and she asked if he was in love with someone, because Alanna couldn’t think outside of extremes – a crush, infatuation, desire, were not terms for her. Thom thought it over and said yes; it was a decision more than anything else. They nodded at each other, and went back to their estrangement, though more peaceful than before. She covered for him with their father, who tried so hard and was trying so much too late, when he snuck out of the house to be with the person he was in love with and didn’t ask questions.

He grew a beard and grew his hair out like Roger’s. He looked in the mirror and didn’t see an adult, but something like it. Not a child. He and Roger were going to save the world some day, he was sure, and it’s beginnings were simply rooted in their quickfire discussions, their reading side by side, the way Thom would sit at Roger’s feet and Roger would stroke his hair for hours on end, the way he would sneak over to Roger’s house after a day of classes with him where they looked at each other with silent laughter at those around them in their eyes, and Roger would dress him to look like a proper adult. They went to clubs together. With Roger beside him no-one questioned Thom’s age or asked questions. They danced drunk and kissed long and heavy hidden in club bathrooms and school corridors, pulling hard at each others’ hair.

Alanna and their father were gone for a week over the school holidays. Thom had refused to go with them. He and Roger lived out of his bedroom for a week. Roger fucked him on the top of his piano, their hands linked on the keys and gasping into each others’ mouths. They got dope-high on the promise of feeling less bored by the world around them and invented new languages and decided that half the world population needed to die and they were the ones to decide who, decided the population needed to double and they were the ones to decide how and where and the way they could live. Thom said he wanted to learn every language and history and poem and skill ever known then double them, triple them. Roger said he wanted to hold Thom’s brain in his hands, but didn’t know if he wanted to eat it or pray to it. They laughed, cackled, into each others’ mouths. Thom wondered if this was what love always felt like.

Alanna came home early. She had the flu, looked sicker than she ever had. Roger ran out the back door as she came in the front and found Thom in the haze of weed. She shoved him into the shower and didn’t care that he hit his head against the brick wall. She aired the house and flushed his weed down the toilet. She told him if he did it again she’d call the police. He laughed and laughed and laughed until his ribs felt like they were going to break and slept for days.

He woke up scared of everyone and everything. He only managed to get to school because Roger was there. Roger would keep him safe and Roger would give him more weed and with it the panic faded. The world was soft and beautiful and Roger was the love of his life.

When they were seventeen, Alanna found Roger and Thom together. She screamed at them both. She said she’d tell the police, she said Roger was a paedophile, she said Thom was an idiot. Roger covered her mouth with his hand and made himself big, somehow, made himself fill up the room and fill up her small body until it froze. He threatened to kill her then said he wouldn’t need to, because his cousin was a cop, his uncle and his father had been a cop, and who was going to believe her over him, when Thom wouldn't be saying anything, would he?

Thom shook his head in silence.

Alanna smacked him so hard his cheek bled.

Roger laughed, and she spat in his face. Thom stopped Roger from hitting her, but only just.

When they were seventeen their father died.

He didn’t know if there was anything more to his heart than Roger. Alanna wasn’t _in_ his heart – she had made it, and it seemed that she could leave it, if she wished, and she did. He learned what it was to live without someone he loved, but it wasn’t his father. The loss of his father burned slowly and painfully within him because there was so little lost. But it was the loss of Alanna which hurt. He didn’t know if she loved their father. He didn’t know if she loved him any more or if she ever would again. Alanna moved out of their family home the day she graduated from high school. She began training as a police officer before her exams were over. She didn’t look at Thom as she left. She didn’t say goodbye. He didn’t understand anything.

When they were seventeen, Roger left to travel around Europe. He didn’t know for how long. Thom was too empty for it to hurt. He was too anxious to feel anything. They shared a vial of heroin and held each other all night. Didn’t talk, didn’t fuck. Just held each other as the high came and went.

His first two years at University, shifting from degree to degree, changing majors and minors, drifted, somehow detached from real life. He lived off the student allowance and out of the family home. He didn’t make friends. He didn’t respect his teachers. He didn’t care but for the burning lust to understand _everything_ to know _everything_ and to have control over something anything just one thing and he was so scared he thought he might die. He bought dope and that seemed like enough. He ate too much. He pulled at his skin ‘til it bruised, wishing his wrists were tiny again.

Alanna phoned, sometimes. They didn’t talk much. Neither of them were really fond of conversation, when it came to it. They listened to each others’ breathing and it almost drove them both mad. Alanna asked if Thom could play her something, anything, on the piano. He couldn’t. He tried. He couldn’t. She hung up, because there was nothing else to do. He remembered her saying that music made her remember why she lived, and he thought he was the last person to ask what it meant to be alive. He missed her so much he couldn’t feel it any more.

In the third year, Roger came back bone-thin and dark and more beautiful than ever to begin his Ph.D, on educating teenagers in such a way that they would come up with a thousand questions that a teacher couldn’t possibly answer a day, to turn those questions into work, to turn those questions into the burning _want_ _need passion_ of someone like Thom. Roger kissed him in the hallway without saying hello, cupped Thom’s face in his hands and let their lips linger together as people pushed past, paid them no mind, didn’t see the way Thom fell into the aura of Roger’s _self_ more than his body. Roger promised that he was the only one he wanted, but refused to answer who he had wanted in the two years before. He talked about Europe and its wildness as if it were a myth, and Thom listened like any believer of any myth. He listened for the tiniest of changes in Roger’s voice, heard every word, felt it fill his cavernous body.

Their bodies met in new ways than they did before. Thom was taller, bigger, and the way his body and mind and words had oscillated as a youth, making him wild and a thousand different versions of himself within himself, was gone. The passion of adolescence, so aimless and powerful, was still in him, dormant and ready to strike at anything that drew him in, just a little, it could be such a small and gentle thing, and Roger was large and beautiful and rough and refined and they fucked on his desk then lay together on the floor and tried to answer the secrets of the universe in the tiny space between their lips, their chests, their arms and legs tangling and untangling together, their sweat drying together and looking like stardust on their skin.

The backs of Roger’s knees were covered in trackmarks so uniform and beautiful that they almost looked like a tattoo. His arms were clean. He studied and taught as he always had, charismatic and emanating power, and shot up between classes. Gently gently he helped Thom push needles into his veins; his arms his legs his collarbone just to see how it felt, sucked blood from the wound and the broken veins were hidden with hickeys. They saved the world every night they spent together then razed it to the ground by morning. Thom’s body shrunk back to where Roger had left it, his bones and his muscles and the curves of his face unhidden by fat. They left dope and its need for sustenance far behind in favour of the heroin, which sustained itself.

Thom wrote treatises on language and history and where everything went wrong and how to fix it, he wrote books-worth of study high then tried to edit them sober. He dropped out of uni. He forgot his twenty-second birthday, forgot Alanna’s. She reached out by email. He didn’t tell her anything. He didn’t want to, couldn’t risk it. She was a full cop. He was a uni dropout and a junkie and a philosopher and he was happy that way and knew that she couldn’t be. He stopped opening her emails. He didn’t take her calls. She stopped trying. She was imprinted in his memory as that almost-but-not-quite adult, skin still shifting, self still spiralling and spinning below, bones at a standstill, core set. He wondered if she was still. If she, like always, was coming into herself, getting stronger and stabler everyday. He wondered if her bones had changed. He scraped his bones with needles.

He and Roger grew from their quiet arguments, inherent misunderstandings and difference at the deepest parts of them. They shared blood and time and sweat and water and words and kisses. “I love you,” Thom said one day, in a strange and sober time, sitting at Roger’s feet in his office, Roger’s fingers gently stroking through his hair as he worked. He was sure they had said it high. Roger said nothing. How rare it was, for Roger to be silent.

Roger stopped teaching. He didn’t stop his Ph.D, not really, but stopped seeing his supervisor, stopped submitting drafts. It had warped into something else entirely. He cried sometimes. It seemed it was then that he stopped teaching Thom, too. They saw each other cry and everything went unspoken, and it was okay. They needed more and more. The come-downs were harder and quicker, the moments sober no longer simply loud and inane but freezing and terrifying. They were warm, tangled together.

Roger lived off his trust fund. Thom lived off Roger and out of the dark of his home where his sister never returned. He pushed his bed down the stairs one day because he was too tired of having to walk up them to get to sleep. He broke the banisters and his wrist. He slept at the foot of the stairs at the front door and dreamt of beautiful things.

Roger let himself in, because Thom had given him the only keys. He never locked the door anyway. “Oh, my darling boy,” he said, “you’re the most beautiful thing in the world.” Roger kissed him gently and took the needle from his arm, pressing his thumb over the wound and allowing blood to pool into the curves of his skin. He smeared the ichor over Thom’s lips and kissed him. He didn’t even look as he broke the crook of his knee, took Thom’s blood and Thom’s heroin and _Thom_ into his body one last time, whispering desperate, breathy, coming down from his high, “I love you,” before taking up a new needle one last time. They were one body, until they were not. Until it was Roger’s _body_ , not Roger, curled into Thom’s side as if sleeping, so still and so beautiful he looked more like a statue than a corpse. Thom tried to wake him for hours. Time under heroin drifted like smoke in wind. He couldn’t hear himself shouting, couldn’t feel his own body, still felt Roger’s, Roger inside him himself in Roger Roger’s hands on his cheeks and the skin of Roger’s lips contrasting to the skin of his nose the way Roger pushed the needle in so gently so gently kissing him soft and hard and violent and tender all at once and taught him how to throw a punch and taught him how to _think_ and taught him how to kiss like only he knew and then how he stopped teaching and just held Thom close, tight in his arms.

He pushed his last needle into his arm with Roger’s corpse still slung over him. He called an ambulance, threw his phone to the ground as the drug hit. He had told them to be ready for a corpse, and didn’t care if he made it two. He heard them, absently, telling him he had to let go, he just had to let go and then they could help him.

Thom Trebond was twenty-three years old. He realised as they filled out paperwork and asked him the same questions over and over again that it was his birthday. He was too close to death to be admitted to rehab yet, he was told. Or perhaps he figured that out on his own.

He thought of Alanna, ten years old, collarbone broken and alone in the hospital. He wondered if she felt the way that he did then. If the lights and the sound and the movement hurt her as much as it hurt him. He wondered if he hoped hard enough he could imagine Roger back into being.

Alanna was handsome and strong and showed no emotion, as she had with her collarbone, sitting at Thom’s side and speaking in hushed tones with the doctors. She looked like a grown-up, a real one. He’d never seen her like that before. He begged for heroin, because it was his birthday, then forgot as he fell into drugged sleep, for days and days and days. He woke up closer to sober than he’d been in three years. He wanted to die.

He had HIV. He did not have AIDS. He didn’t really understand the difference. He had scars that might never heal. He had a hole inside him, from losing not just his best friend and his lover and the love of his life, but the ten year old boy in a scratchy bow-tie looking up at the teenager speaking Elvish and deciding that he would cradle language under his tongue with all the reverence of history, the fourteen year old boy dying from refusing what he needed to live and trying to become part of someone else, the sixteen year old who lusted to stay alive for the first time in his life, the twenty year old who suddenly knew what it was to love, to the twenty-two year old who knew what it was not just to love but to want to live and die for love, to the twenty-three year old realising he might never feel _whole_ again.

Alanna did not answer her phone. He sat in the discharge room for four hours, feeling his tears burn his skin, more than fall from his eyes. One of the visiting academic doctors, trying to find the cure for eating disorders in the blood of the survivors, Numair, drove him home because it was on his way anyway, and policy didn’t apply considering he wasn’t really staff. He did not pity him, did not talk to him about what had happened or what he could’ve should’ve would’ve done better. He talked about the reasons different birds sung as they do, four year old refugees starving themselves to death in detention centres, the way that music could be used to gently, gently, pull dementia patients back, just a little, to their lives before.

Thom couldn’t go through the threshold. Couldn’t see the room where Roger had fucked him for the first time and the last time. Couldn’t see the quiet disarray of a house no longer home to _him_ but to the heroin. Everything smelled of steriliser. The house had been cleaned professionally. He could just see that the banisters of the staircase had been removed entirely, jagged wood sanded down, perfectly smooth. His bed was gone. He knew, somehow, that it wouldn’t be upstairs. It would have been burned. He tried to feel his heartbeat. He didn’t seem to have one.

Numair stood in the doorway and calmly informed him that a phone seemed to be ringing. Thom crawled under the broken staircase to find it. Its screen was shattered. Alanna was at the hospital. She had lost her phone, too. She didn’t know that he had needed her and she was sorry and she hated him and she was sorry and she never meant to leave him and she would come take him home, wherever that was supposed to be. It seemed she wasn’t smacking him when he fucked up anymore, but somehow her kindness and her tears were worse. Alanna Trebond wasn’t supposed to cry.

‘Home’, it turned out, was her boyfriend’s mother’s just-deceased husband’s house, just outside the city boundaries. He was to stay there, with the boyfriend’s mother, a retired nurse of some sort. Apparently he had been told and he had consented. Numair spoke to the nurse and his sister, who seemed to be one too, somehow, what had he forgotten, yes, he had forgotten. She was no longer a police officer. She was studying to be a doctor. He had been high when she told him. She hadn’t known. She hadn’t known any of it, said she couldn’t have guessed. He said he wouldn’t have wanted her to.

Numair asked if he could visit sometime, because Thom knew so much about the acoustics of sound in the body, the way a voice worked, the way sound filled up the world, though Thom had no memory of having spoken at all. Thom said ‘yes’, though he didn’t know why.

The boyfriend was a social worker who had been imprisoned for five years when he was fifteen for possession of two grams of marijuana. He knew about heroin. He showed no particular sympathy for Thom but the sort of inherent kindness which made Thom feel smaller than he already did. He weighed ninety pounds. He found out he had only avoided jail time because the doctors said there was nothing left to him but the heroin. That he had no control. That he was not a self, anymore, just the drug and a druggy dead lover six years his senior, who he’d known since he was a child. They said he'd been groomed by a man now-dead. How could he be sent to prison, for living through that hell? He didn't know how to tell them there was no hell like the one he lived in.

He missed heroin. He missed dope. He missed Roger not like he missed the drugs, but like missing something he’d forgotten and couldn’t quite remember, as if he’d forgotten how to breathe and so his lungs were burning him and begging him just to try take oxygen in, but it wasn’t there for him to take anymore. His lungs ached. He was terrified of forgetting Roger’s face, the curve of his collarbones, the tattoo-bruises of his knees, the way he sounded in the morning when he’d just woken up, the way his pupils blew when he was turned on, the way his fingers fit against Thom’s at the end of a day. A part of him knew he could never forget, but it was a risk he couldn’t take. He wasn’t ready to let go.

He listened to people come and go and didn’t fight his withdrawal medication. A billion papercuts every day, inside and outside, the insidious punishment of the heroin for him abandoning it. He lay still in the quiet and the dark and couldn’t beg out loud to not have to go into the sun. His voice was gone again. He couldn’t make a sound. He hallucinated Roger with him and hated himself for it. He hallucinated Alanna with him and hated her when she was really there for seeing him as he was. He sat in the sun until his skin began to burn and peel. He relearned what it was to eat, what it was to be hungry. He relearned what it was for his heart to beat faster, smoother, without the heroin, like he was some form of alive. He relearned what it was to be apart from someone he loved, this time knowing that his love wouldn't-couldn't come back.

Numair visited, although Thom couldn’t-wouldn’t-didn’t know how to speak. He helped Eleni, Alanna’s boyfriend-- _George_ ’s mother, retired nurse, domestic violence survivor, quiet and riotous and calm and exuberant all at once, clean the house which her husband had beat her in until he died, until she could begin to make a home from it. He mopped all the floors while she did the dishes and Thom silently, slowly, folded piles upon piles of clean laundry which smelled pure and like they were carrying a little of the sun which dried them in their fibres. He cleaned the bathroom. He was good at getting stains out of things. Alanna would come even if she didn’t want to, even if he didn’t want her to. She wouldn’t talk, either. She would just sit with him, sometimes. Gently, gently rub his spasming muscles as he grew back into his body and failed to sleep. She would wake him from nightmares, sometimes. She was far better at it than Eleni. They all knew he _could_ make noise – he screamed in his sleep.

Alanna still had her eating disorder. It had never left, just changed shape, turned from bones into muscles like he had never seen on anyone before. He hadn’t realised, couldn’t have guessed. Numair told him quietly one day as Alanna carried with her extraordinary strength the dusty old piano from the garage into the living room. He said they could relearn how to eat together. Numair tried and failed to tune it. Eleni played ‘Chopsticks’ and ‘The Moonlight Sonata’ on the out-of-tune keys. Thom almost fell into the piano when he opened it. The lid on its own was almost heavier than him. He tuned it as Eleni and George cooked and Alanna and Numair talked about bodies, and how they worked, and how they grew strong, and how they fell apart. They were friends in a way Thom had never known, and he felt warmth, a quiet kind of pride for his sister, spread through him. He _felt_ it and that seemed like a miracle.

Thom relearned to smile. He didn’t touch the piano.

Jonathan, elegant and beautiful and heartbroken, no longer trying to be saviour, wanted to be his friend, carry a friendship, at least, out of their grief. Thom didn’t think he knew how to be a friend. Not to Jonathan and his perfect blue eyes and the proud hook of his nose, the pristine upper-class posture and musical tenor of his voice. But Jonathan kept coming back. Perhaps, Thom thought, that was what it was to be a friend. To come back. He wasn’t sure if he would ever come back, though he knew not from where he would be returning. He imagined he and Jonathan falling in love, and then hated himself when he woke. He saw Roger’s corpse, imposed over Jonathan’s living body.

He forgot Elvish. He forgot how to read like an academic. He had all of his textbooks and essays and academic papers, all his law and politics and humanities, donated to those who needed them. He would never touch them again. His passion was gone. His drive to achieve something bigger than himself, just the longing to _learn -_ gone. He hoped it never came back.

Instead, he learned how to speak without words and give in to the fact he may never speak again, no matter how much he tried, no matter how many psychologists and rehab councillors and doctors and HIV specialists and friends, which he seemed to have, somehow, told him he could. That they would hear him. That his voice would be rough and weak with disuse, and that that was okay. Even when living like real people live, 'support' wasn't always enough to heal.

He learned that Alanna was better suited to being a doctor in a world where ethics and law didn’t go hand in hand, where the world was so complicated that there were very few ways, really, to save a life – and she wanted to know all of them. And she wanted to save his. She was the only one who didn’t try to get him to talk. She knew what it was to be silent and to speak again.

He learned that Alanna had never once forgotten who she was, even if she had gotten lost. He learned that he didn’t know who he was without her, without Roger, as mirrors – she and he were not each others’ mirror images anymore.  
  
He learned what it was to possess himself – he learned that he would sometimes have to start again every day.

He learned that to grieve was to live with someone who wasn’t there. Roger’s last lesson.

On a sleepless night, barefooted in a home he hadn’t realised he was helping to create, Thom Trebond was twenty-four years old. He sat at the piano. Quietly he began to play.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!! I hope that you enjoyed (angst-enjoyed?) this, and as always feedback, comments, kudos etc. are always welcome, particularly as this has been written quickly and gone without editing!
> 
> I'm also on tumblr at thomtrebond.tumblr.com (every time I write angst about him I feel I deserve that username less and less, but oh well, it's mine now) and always excited to talk about Tamora Pierce (apparently there's going to be a Tortall TV show ??? wild time to be alive). 
> 
> have a lovely day/night/etc.!! :)


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